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Julian Steele's fight for Negro nurses and physicians

By Amy Dean

"I am very sorry to tell you that we have not found it possible to take colored girls into our school," wrote Katharine Shepard, superintendent of Boston's Household Nursing Association, Inc., and the Training School for Attendant Nurses, to Julian Steele on April 4, 1942. "While we might be able to manage it for the household training, there is the difficulty of placing them into hospitals."

	Julian Steele in the 1930s.

Steele (1906-1970) was a long-time Massachusetts state official who served as the first commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs when it was created in 1965, and deputy commissioner of the Department of Commerce and Development. He earned a national reputation as an expert in urban renewal as the Massachusetts coordinator for the Model Cities program, vice president for renewal of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Organizations, and assistant administrator of the federal government's House and Home Finance Agency for Region I. To honor his work in creating affordable housing a complex of 284 rental apartments for low- and very-low-income families in Lowell was named for him.

Although Steele earned respect and recognition from his work for the commonwealth of Massachusetts, lesser known is his championing an end to the discrimination of Negro nurses and physicians in Massachusetts hospitals and training schools in the early 1940s. He initiated a massive letter-writing drive and generated grassroots-level interest that helped push the passage of Massachusetts House Bill No. 1751, which prohibited the training schools of tax-exempt hospitals from discriminating against anyone on the basis of race or color. Copies of these letters, along with student records, business papers, copies of speeches, photographs, miscellaneous bills and records, calendars, and other items were given in 1973 to BU's Special Collections by Steele's wife.

The battle begins
"As you know," Steele wrote in one of his letters soliciting support for the bill, "our colored girls and young men suffer very greviously [sic] by reasons of such discrimination."

While African-American physicians and nurses were not embraced by American hospitals in general, many were able to receive training and attain practicing positions. Boston, however, kept most hospital doors and medical schools shut to qualified people of color (with BU's School of Medicine one of the exceptions). "I refer applicants to some of the good schools in New York," Shepard concluded in her letter.

Thomas Patrick, Jr., a New York pediatrician, wrote to Steele:

Of the ten or twelve city hospitals in New York, only three have colored men on their staffs. Seaview, which cares for tubercular patients, has one. Queens General after a long fight, now has three or four. The third is Harlem Hospital. Here there are many more. This is located in the heart of the Negro section and about 95% of its patients are colored.

The chiefs of all the services are white. Of the sixty odd internes [sic] only four or five are colored. Only three colored doctors have courtesy privileges at the voluntary hospitals.

All in all, however, the situation is far better than it is in Boston.

In 1941, there were "28 Negro physicians in Boston, not one of whom has, at the present, any hospital connections," Steele wrote in another letter. "This means that a Negro physician cannot treat his patients in any of the hospitals. This has led to a difficult situation. Men who have been out of medical school for a few years become stale and find it difficult to keep up with the latest developments in medicine, and therefore a vicious circle is created in which the hospitals can say that they do not take them because they are incompetent, and they are incompetent because they have no clinical experience."

Luther Conant, Jr., a columnist for the Boston Evening Transcript, provided Steele with ammunition for his battle in his February 18, 1941, column "Your Boston":

It is impossible in the year 1941 for a Negro woman to be delivered by a Negro doctor in a Boston hospital.

It is impossible for a Negro patient to be treated by a Negro physician or a Negro surgeon in a Boston hospital.

It is infinitely harder for a Negro student to gain admittance to an outstanding medical school than it was two generations ago. There have been no Negro students at the Harvard Medical School for the last 10 years.

. . .There is only one hospital in Boston where Negro girls are admitted to the nurses' training school or to a staff position.

There are many complex sociological factors behind this situation. Some of them are beyond the control of any hospital or group of hospitals. And some of them are not. . . . There is no Negro physician on the regular, consulting or courtesy staff of any non-profit or city-administered hospital in Boston . . . in the case of a hospital where non-staff doctors have the privilege of attending patients they bring in, a Negro doctor must refer his patient to a white doctor.

There have been individual cases of Negro internes [sic] but they are very rare. It is increasingly difficult for Negro medical students to obtain the same clinical experience as their white classmates. Boston University, which once had many more Negro medical students than it does today, said very frankly that they warn incoming Negro students of this difficulty. They are proud of the fact, however, that they have so far been able to provide sufficient clinical experience.

While a majority of Boston's medical leaders did not hold with the opinion that Negro doctors were inferior to white doctors, the real obstacle to ending discrimination was based on social considerations and attitudes at the time. "We cannot do what we'd like to do," was the comment of a doctor at Massachusetts Memorial, where one retired Negro physician was on the consulting staff.

"A situation such as exists in Boston is illogical and improper," physician Hugh Cabot told Conant. "I have sympathy for hospital trustees. . . but no respect for those who exclude Negro physicians."

The roots of equality
Nor did Steele, whose campaign for Bill 1751 touched a variety of groups in the Boston area -- the Race Relations Committee of the Boston Area Council of Churches, the Everett Colored Citizen's League, numerous physicians in Boston hospitals and clinics, state senators and representatives, and physicians across the country.

"The abolition of race prejudice in the field of medicine is an ethical and social step forward in a great humane science -- where such should not be necessary," wrote Louis Wright, an Ithaca, N.Y., physician. "It is a worthy fight and I wish you success."

In many ways, the fight for the rights of African-Americans had begun for Steele during his education at Harvard College (1925-1929), where he composed papers on race relations. He then attended the New York School of Social Work and later, through his work at the Robert Gould Shaw Settlement House in Boston (1931-1938), became involved in Inter-Racial Fellowship/International Friends, the National Negro Congress, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the NAACP, and a committee to explore the possibility of creating a hospital for blacks in Boston.

The bill stalls, then passes
Bill 1751 passed in the House by a voice vote and after a third reading in the Senate with opposition, by a voice vote there in 1941. Then it was tabled after many senators were advised to kill the bill -- predominantly by the trustees or superintendents of nonprofit hospitals. "Much as we'd like to admit Negro nurses to our hospitals, it just won't work out," said one unidentified source.

In response, Steele sent out this letter on March 20, 1941:

The Republican leadership of the Massachusetts Senate has an opportunity and an obligation to support House Bill No. 1751. This is a bill to prevent hospitals which conduct training schools for nurses from discriminating in such training schools on account of race or color. . . . Certain bigoted and reactionary forces in the Commonwealth, led we are told, by a former chairman of the Republican State Committee, and a former State Senator, and by persons prominent in the civil and social life of Boston, signified their desire to have this bill defeated. They did not dare to come out in the open and voice their opposition. They preferred to act behind closed doors and in secret chambers.

. . . Intelligent white people and colored people have signified their desire that this bill shall pass. The Democratic leadership of the Senate has expressed its determination to support this bill. It is now up to the Republicans to show where they stand in the fight against discrimination and intolerance in Massachusetts.

What is most striking about Steele's hard-fought campaign is that early in 1918, the federal government issued a call for nurses that authorized black nurses in national service. All black nurses who had been registered and trained by the American Red Cross Society, which enlisted workers without regard to creed or color, were able to tend to black servicemen. On April 6, 1942, Steele received a reply to a letter he had sent to the Secretary of War. Truman K. Gibson, Jr., assistant civilian aide to the secretary, wrote, "The Army is in need of trained graduate nurses, both white and colored."
House Bill 1751 eventually passed, in large part because of Steele's efforts. After his death at age 63, former Massachusetts Governor John A. Volpe said, "I have long respected him as an administrator, a leader, and a man. . . . At all levels of endeavor his expertise was always coupled with compassion and his ambition was paired with dedication."

In his 25th anniversary alumni note in Harvard's alumni magazine, Steele wrote that he, his wife, and their daughter, Emilie, "are concerned about man's intolerance, religious, racial, and social. We believe that human progress can be measured largely in terms of acceptance of difference as interesting and our common humanity as profoundly important. We hope we belong to the Human Race and suspect that many of our friends do."

The Department of Special Collections at Boston University, located in Mugar Memorial Library, is one of the largest repositories of documents, memorabilia, and books chronicling the lives and careers of important writers, artists, performers, and public figures of the past century. The collection, which was started in 1963, includes archival material and rare books dating back to the 16th century. Contemporary archives now contain private papers and artifacts of 2,000 notable 20th-century figures.

22 February 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations